Peter Geoghegan

PITY Boris Johnson. The fabled bon vivant has not had many opportunities to entertain in recent months. The pandemic has meant that foreign visitors have been thin on the ground. That changed on Friday when Johnson hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban.

BORIS Johnson is a man who seems to go out of his way to avoid telling the truth. Whether it’s the string of jilted lovers – or the Democratic Unionists – Johnson is walking proof of that old saying about how you can tell that a politician is lying because their lips are moving.

THE first job I had that was not paid by the hour was at sectarian interface in Derry. It was 2008 – a decade after the Good Friday Agreement had ostensibly brought peace to Northern Ireland – and I was charged with encouraging Catholic and Protestant communities on either side of a 10-foot high corrugated barrier to “re-imagine their built environment”.

BORIS Johnson does not like confrontation. As the prime minister’s former lover Petronella Wyatt recalled a couple of years ago, here is a man who will “do anything to avoid an argument”. Even if it means telling bare-faced lies.

IT was a busy week in Scottish politics. One would-be opposition leader resigned. (Richard Leonard.) Another left to front the Scottish branch of a rebranded party headed by a man who was recently flogging investment tips for £199 a year. (Michelle Ballantyne and Nigel Farage, respectively.)

DO you remember what you were doing on this day three years ago? I do. It’s not because I keep a meticulous diary (I don’t) or have a terrific memory for dates (I haven’t). I remember it because it was the day that I realised just how broken America’s politics is.

A NEW Ireland?

ON June 24, 2016, Crispin Odey was smiling. The hedge fund manager and long-time Conservative Party donor had two good reasons to be happy. Britain had voted to leave the EU. And he had just pocketed £220 million.

IT reads like the plotline of a hackneyed political thriller. A fresh-faced TV actor plays a downtrodden everyman who rides a wave of popular anger to become his country’s leader. Then he repeats the trick in real-life.

THE shambles that was British politics this week had plenty of commentators grasping for their history books. Was Theresa May’s climbdown as embarrassing as Suez? Could it be compared to Dunkirk? Or some centuries-old battle that most folk have scarcely heard of?